Table of Contents

Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv
1. Intimidations of Empire: Predicaments of the Tactile and Unseen / Ann Laura Stoler 1
2. Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies / Ann Laura Stoler 23
Convergence and Comparison
3. Samoa’s Half-Castes and Some Frontiers of Comparison / Damon Salesa 71
4. States of Hygiene: Race “Improvement” and Biomedical Citizenship in Australia and the Colonial Philippines / Warwick Anderson 94
5. Adjudicating Intimacies on U.S. Frontiers / Nayan Shah 116
6. Proper Caresses and Prudent Distance: A How-To Manual from Colonial Louisiana / Shannon Lee Dawdy 140
7. “His Kingdon for a Kiss”: Indians and Intimacy in the Narrative of John Marrant / Tiya Miles 163
Proximities of Power
8. The Intimacies of Four Continents / Lisa Lowe 191
9. Body Work in the Antebellum United States / Kathleen Brown 213
10. Fractions and Fictions in the United States Census of 1890 / Martha Hodes 240
11. The Fair Ensemble: Kate Chopin in St. Louis in 1904 / Laura Wexler 271
12. “The Perfect Mistress of Russian Economy”: Sighting the Intimate on a Colonial Alaskan Terrain, 1784–1821 / Gwenn A. Miller 297
Circuits of Knowledge Production
13. An Empire of Tests: Psychometrics and the Paradoxes of Nationalism in the Americas / Alexandra Minna Stern 325
14. Making “American” Families: Transnational Adoption and U.S. Latin American Policy / Laura Briggs 344
15. The Darkness That Enters the Home: The Politics of Prostitution during the Pilippine-American War / Paul A. Kramer 366
16. Ordering Others: U.S. Financial Advisers in the Early Twentieth Century / Emily S. Rosenberg 405
Refractions
17. Internal Colonialism and Gender / Linda Gordon
427
18. Commentary / Catherine Hall 452
19. Afterword / Nancy F. Cott 469
Bibliography 473
Contributors 531
Index 535

Promotional Information

An innovative collection that brings postcolonial critiques to bear on North American history and draws on that history to question the analytic conventions of postcolonial studies

About the Author

Ann Laura Stoler is Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies and Chair of the Anthropology Department at The New School for Social Research. She is the author of Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule and Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (also published by Duke University Press), and a coeditor of Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World.

Reviews

"This powerful collection of dazzling essays offers essential reading for our times. It shows us historically how the vast geopolitical movements of empire and globalization rely on intimate recesses of everyday domestic life at home and abroad. It demonstrates the urgency of understanding the long history and geographical reach of the American empire through comparative and transnational perspectives."Amy Kaplan, author of The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture "Haunted by Empire brilliantly illustrates how power plays out in the management of bodies, sentiments, and desires. Readers interested in how attention to the intimate is reconfiguring both U.S. history and postcolonial studies and illuminating the convergences between the two will treasure this rich and provocative book." Jacquelyn Hall, Spruill Professor of History, UNC-Chapel Hil